creating category tables or just use lists?

[whatson]

Say for example you have a product page, and you wish to have 3 images of the product. You can create a field call images, and have a list of all the sources of the images, e.g. image1.jpg, image2.jpg, image3.jpg. Then you can create an array for your images and run a loop to display them.

Alternatively you can create a new table called images, that can match the product up with the images, e.g.
Product ID Image
1 image1.jpg
1 image2.jpg
1 image3.jpg

Which way is the best? and why?

[swa66]

As far as I can tell you're asking if normalizing your database is a good thing ?
Sure it's a good thing, it's the essence of being for relational databases.

So yes: separate tables and relations is by far the superior long term choice.
Messing with creating structure yourself inside a field means the database can't help you anymore in the long run.

Just imagine in both cases what happens when you need a separate caption for each image, store the dimensions of the pictures, track the source where you got the picture, copyright status of each image, ...

You need to see a database as much more than a stupid table that holds data in a persistent manner.

[topr8]

exactly as swa66 says

in my images table i store the height,width,alt, and various other info